President Barack Obama insists he does not obsess about “the narrative,” the everyday media play-by-play of political Washington. He urges his team to tune out “the noise,” “the echo chamber,” the Beltway obsession with who’s up and who’s down. But in the fall of 2014, he got sick of the narrative of gloom hovering over his White House. Unemployment was dropping and troops were coming home, yet only one in four Americans thought the nation was on the right track—and Democrats worried about the midterm elections were sprinting away from him. He wanted to break through the noise.

Obama’s strategists, led by his longtime political guru David Axelrod, had always warned him against “dancing in the end zone.” Their polling suggested that gloating about the recovery would backfire when so many Americans were still hurting. But Obama thought it was time to spike the football, and in a speech at Northwestern University, he tried to reshape his narrative. If the presidential bully pulpit couldn’t drown out the echo chamber, he figured nothing could.

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“Sometimes the noise clutters and, I think, confuses the nature of the reality out there,” Obama said. “Here are the facts.”

The facts were that America had put more people back to work than the rest of the world’s advanced economies combined. High school graduation rates were at an all-time high, while oil imports, the deficit, and the uninsured rate had plunged. The professor-turned-president was even more insistent than usual that he was merely relying on “logic and reason and facts and data,” challenging his critics to do the same. “Those are the facts. It’s not conjecture. It’s not opinion. It’s not partisan rhetoric. I laid out facts.”

The Northwestern speech did reshape the narrative, but not in the way Obama intended. The only line that made news came near the end of his 54-minute address, an observation that while he wouldn’t be on the ballot in the fall midterms, “these policies are on the ballot—every single one of them.” When Obama boarded Air Force One after his speech, his speechwriter, Cody Keenan, told him the Internet had already flagged that line as an idiotic political gaffe.

“What exactly was untrue about it?” Obama asked, a bit incredulous.

Nothing, but Obama’s words couldn’t change the narrative of his unpopularity; they just gave Republicans a new opening to exploit it. They quickly became a staple of campaign ads and stump speeches tying Democrats ball-and-chain to their leader. “Republicans couldn’t have written a better script,” declared The Fix, the Washington Post’s column for political junkies. Even Axelrod called it “a mistake” on Meet the Press. The substance of the speech was ignored, and Keenan still blames himself for letting one off-message phrase eclipse a story of revival, a prelude to the second Republican midterm landslide of the Obama era. “I’m still pissed off about that,” Keenan told me. “Everything he said was true and important, and that one line got turned against him.”

Illustration by Peter Strain

Obama was hailed as a new Great Communicator during his yes-we-can 2008 campaign, but he’s often had a real failure to communicate in office. The narrative began spinning out of his control in the turbulent opening days of his presidency, and he’s never totally recaptured it. His tenure has often felt like an endless series of media frenzies over messaging snafus—from the fizzled “Recovery Summer” to “you didn’t build that” to the Benghazi furor, which is mostly a furor about talking points.

What happened to Obama’s message is not just an inside-baseball question. Perceptions of presidents matter: They can shape an administration’s ability to get things done, and even the way the nation thinks about itself. Obama may resent how “the narrative” judges long-term policies and even historical legacies according to the latest polls, but his struggles to make the case for his record have helped Republicans reclaim both houses of Congress, along with governors’ offices and legislatures nationwide. They also set the tone for this year’s campaign to replace him, with Republicans blasting him as a pure catastrophe while Democrats gingerly try to embrace him without denying the prevailing narrative of hard times.

When Obama himself has been asked about his administration’s failures, he’s harped on communication failures, and it’s been a consistent theme inside his White House. “Our policies are so awesome,” he quipped to a few aides after a 2011 Roosevelt Room meeting. “Why can’t you guys do a better job selling them?” I interviewed more than two dozen current and former administration officials for this article, and at least a dozen told me some version of the internal joke that every problem in Obamaworld is a communications problem.

Like him or not, Obama has had a hugely consequential presidency, transforming America’s approach to foreign and domestic affairs, enacting almost all of his original Change We Can Believe In policy agenda. And credit him or not, America’s trajectory has improved on his watch. Along with the trends he cited at Northwestern, the housing market, gas prices, combat deaths, and other vital statistics have moved in the right direction. So why does only a quarter of the public still think the country is on the right track? Why haven’t his reforms of health care, education, energy and Wall Street been more popular? In short, why hasn’t America gotten his message?

Obama veterans have a slew of theories about what went wrong. They cite the challenges of driving a complex message through the horrific crisis he inherited. They blame the intensifying polarization of the public judging him, with nearly half the electorate reflexively opposing almost anything he does. They recognize the contrast between his pristine campaign vision of change and the change he’s been grinding out in the real world, through the kind of messy Washington sausage-making he used to criticize on the trail. And the White House’s own messaging strategy, a subject of perennially fierce internal debate, has been perennially debatable.

Most of all, they cite the dizzying changes in modern media, where Americans get their news where they choose, where conflict is the click of the realm, where lies travel at the speed of tweet while the truth is still annotating its Medium post. They blame short-attention-span journalism for creating a distorted narrative of a flailing presidency, by freaking out over crises—double-digit unemployment, the Gulf oil spill, the healthcare.gov malfunction, Ebola—and virtually ignoring their resolutions. They think the bully pulpit has lost much of its power in an era of 24-hour cable and social media, though they admit they were slow to adjust to the new realities. When Obama spoke at Northwestern, he didn’t even have presidential Facebook or Twitter accounts.

Then again, political types love to blame bad outcomes on bad communications, and for some of Obama’s problems—chaos in Syria and Libya, the website fiasco, disappointing wage growth—it’s hard to imagine a message that could have spun lemons into lemonade. Some Obama policies are unpopular because they’re not what people want. Some Americans are dissatisfied with the Obama era because they’re not doing well.

The president’s Spock-like, no-drama persona has also complicated his efforts to connect with the public at times when terrorists were beheading innocents and pathogens were on the loose, especially in the new on-demand environment of rapid response and viral content. Obama sees himself as playing a longer game, rising above the tyranny of the news cycle, valuing the verdict of history over the hot take. But the Washington narrative unspools in real time, and to quote one of his favorite TV shows, The Wire, the game is the game.

Obama and his team sometimes claim they simply haven’t tried hard enough to market their policies. “We don’t go out and explain why we’re doing what we’re doing,” Vice President Biden told me. “When we have a good idea, we think it will be self-evident.” The president has delivered 3,300 speeches and remarks, so he’s certainly tried to explain why he’s done what he’s done. But he still suggests he has neglected communications, as if promoting his policies were as forgettable a chore as cleaning the grill. “One thing I need to constantly remind myself and my team is, it’s not enough to build a better mousetrap,” he said after those embarrassing 2014 midterms. “People don’t automatically come beating to your door. We’ve gotta sell it.”

When pressed, though, Obama aides admit their problems have been less about remembering to sell than making the sale. Yes, Republicans have manufactured “death panels,” “apology tours” and other dubious outrages, while Fox News and talk radio portray Obama’s America as a lurid dystopia where Barack grabs your guns and Michelle steals your snacks. Still, myth-busting is part of his job. And plenty of Democrats have criticized Obama as aloof, tone-deaf and seemingly lost in the new media landscape.

At times, Obama has been one of them. He sees himself as a storyteller as well as a policymaker, and by his own admission, he hasn’t always told a persuasive story.

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One day early in his race for the White House, Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, threw a newspaper on the desk of his traveling press secretary, Dan Pfeiffer. It was the inaugural issue of The Politico, a startup dedicated to as-it-breaks, wall-to-wall coverage of politics for an insider audience.